WASHINGTON — In her new memoir, former first lady Jill Biden looks on former President Joe Biden’s bad showing in a debate against Donald Trump nearly two years ago and wonders if she should have acknowledged it instead of trying to soothe supporters afterward.
Ultimately, the Democrat’s performance backfired on him as he campaigned for re-election, heightening doubts about whether the then-81-year-old could serve a second term. He eventually pulled out his race under pressure from within his party and supported his vice president, Kamala Harris, who lost to the Republican Trump.
In “View from the East Wing,” a biography on her White House years to be published next Tuesday, she said she still does not understand why her husband played so badly that day.
The chain of circumstances that pushed Joe Biden back into private life in Delaware sooner than he had envisioned, including her first public comments on the issue, are contained in a 274-page version of the book obtained by The Associated Press.
The book also covers his prostate cancer diagnosis after he left office, his son Hunter’s federal trial on gun charges, and other crises throughout Joe Biden’s administration, as well as how she balanced the extra responsibilities of first lady and her teaching career.
Here are some passages from the book:
She wondered if Joe was having a stroke arguing Trump. In their Atlanta hotel suite before the debate, Jill Biden recalls, her husband “looked bleary. 'I've every confidence he'll do well,' she said. 'Big events spur him on.' “I noticed right away that Joe was not looking good when the CNN-sponsored event got underway. From the beginning, he was not his usual self.
At one point a few minutes in he blurted something about how "we finally beat Medicare."
“Is he shorting?” “I thought,” she wrote. “This is a stroke? It was like witnessing an AI hologram of the man we knew, and the hologram was glitching out.
She worried if he had been drugged or was having a medical issue.
“He got better as the debate wore on, but not enough to convince me or anyone watching that he was all right. And he definitely wasn’t,” said Jill Biden. Never saw the sight in his face in my life before.
Afterwards, as they walked offstage, he whispered to her in colourful language that he had messed up, which she regarded as “a sign of his having come back to himself.”
But “to this day I still don’t know what happened,” she wrote. They slipped into a Waffle House, attended a post-debate rally and flew to North Carolina for a next-day appearance.
The White House and those close to the president at the time officially said he had a cold. But Jill Biden said she wonders if they should have acknowledged what millions of people witnessed — “that he looked very unwell in that debate.”
“I think the biggest lesson for us was that if you don’t explain something well enough, then the question doesn’t go away,” she wrote. “There was never a satisfactory enough explanation for Joe’s debate performance and a lot of people never got over it.
Biden’s debate performance confirmed many voters’ fears that he was too elderly to continue as president. It triggered a fresh round of calls for him to step aside as the party’s nominee as fellow Democrats began to fret about a Trump return to the White House if Biden remained their candidate.
The drumbeat for him to get out of the race was already starting before the debate was over, and “in the days to come, it would grow louder and louder,” Jill Biden wrote.
Removed from teaching Northern Virginia Community College Jill Biden says she was fired by the institution where she had taught English and writing since 2009 while she was first lady. She signed her annual contract in July 2023 and a termination letter signed by the college president was hand-delivered that winter.
The funding that funded her salary had run out.
“Felt ill,” she wrote. “I was throwing holiday parties at the White House, so I went from reading emails about my firing to groups of kids singing ’Jingle Bells.’
Eventually the matter was settled – she did not explain how –- “and I held my ground.”
But she gave her final session at the institution in December 2024, ending her 40-year teaching career. In the book, she stated that she’s seeking a chance to teach GED classes at a women’s prison she hasn’t named.
Jill Biden ‘saddened’ by damage to East Wing People in Washington emailed her pictures of the demolition and she remarked, “I could hardly look.
First women and their staffs, the social office, the military office and other operations were historically based in the East Wing. Last year Trump tore it down to build a ball room.
“An iconic landmark and historic treasure was being treated like an extreme fixer-upper on HGTV’s ‘Property Brothers,’” she said, adding that what “pained me” was “the symbolic bulldozing of history and the erasure of institutional memory.”
Angry after husband’s diagnosis of prostate cancer She noted that in the year before they left the White House, Biden began waking up multiple times in the middle of the night. She phoned his doctors and told him to go to a urologist.
About four months after he left office, in May 2025, he was diagnosed with stage IV prostate cancer that had spread to his bones. Biden had five and a half weeks of daily radiation treatments and is on hormone medications that can make him tired and cranky.
“But we couldn’t sit in the grief because we were immediately put on the defensive, accused of having hidden his illness,” she wrote.
The White House has a doctor’s office, and presidents receive the best medical care.
“It was enough for Joe to stub his toe for 10 people to want to run at him with bales of gauze,” she wrote. “You wrap the president in bubble wrap and he gets stage IV prostate cancer? It was dumb.
She disagreed with her husband’s early decision not to pardon son Hunter Hunter Biden was convicted just before the fatal debate on all three felony counts stemming from the purchase of a revolver in 2018 when prosecutors said he lied on a mandated gun-buy form indicating he was not unlawfully using or addicted to drugs.
The family was startled the matter went to trial and believed it was politically motivated.
Joe Biden said he wouldn’t pardon his son if he was convicted, but former first lady Jill Biden did have a different view.
In the end it felt like in striving so hard to be unbiased, we ensured Hunter would get the worst possible legal fate,” she wrote. “I think Joe may have gone too far to show that his family was being treated with complete impartiality.
But in his last weeks in office Biden ordered pardons for Hunter, saving him from a potential jail sentence, and for Biden's siblings and their spouses, fearing they may be targeted by the new Trump government.
